This is Colleen Grant, president of iHeartMedia Detroit, and today we're joined with
Jacob Zupki from Whisker. He's the president and CEO. Hi Jacob, welcome,
Thank you for having me this morning. I appreciate being here. Yeah,
good to have you. What is the mission at Whisker. We are
trying to shape the future of pet care through innovative products and inventive accessories that
we bring to market to help pet parents with their pets and give us an
example of what those might be. Whiskers most notably known for the Little Robot,
which is a self cleaning letter box for cats. Over the last twenty
three years, we just hit our millionth robots sold in December. Wow.
Congratulations, thank you. It's a really exciting milestone. It happened to be
the first day that our new CEO started, so we don't know if he
brought good fortune or what, but he was able to help with shipping that
unit out last in December. But we also have the Feeder Robot, which
is a automatic feeder for cats and dogs, and then we have a whole
line of accessories that are really great products for pet parents. So you just
talked about your millions unit. What are some of the other most exciting moments
you can remember at your time? I Whisker, December first, twenty fifteen
is a date that really comes to mind. That was a moment for us
as a company where we really got to see the convergence of how great marketing
and great product could be brought together. So I joined at the beginning of
twenty fifteen. I joined the founder as an Internet marketing consultant at the time,
and throughout the year we got ready for the launch of the Little Robot
three model. Having been fifteen years in business at the time, exponential growth
was not necessarily top of mind in the moment, and I remember we got
ready in September and October of that year leading into November in December for holiday
time to launch the new Little Robot three. And at the time, there
were these social celebrities now called influencers, and we partnered with twenty five of
them to give away twenty five Little Robots, which seemed wild and at the
time, and each day in December we would do one Little Robot a day
giveaway and that first day, December first, twenty fifteen, we had all
the influencers posts on one day about this promotion, and we more than ten
xt our website traffic overnight, and so I remember our peak website traffic was
in the high thirty thousands, and we had over thirty thousand people on the
site that one day. So you're like, wow, people are really into
this. It was super colt. It was a moment where we finally saw
the power of social right and what it could do for our business, and
that really carried into the following years to come. But that was an eye
opening moment. And I would say the second one was we wrote a commercial
called Don't Be a Scooper, and our creative team did a retreat where we
went off site and we all have to pitch an idea and it was an
opportunity to facilitate a moment where the best idea won, and it was a
really cool opportunity we got away. I had read a book called From Poop
to Gold by the Harmon Brothers, who are most notably known for the what's
it called the Squatty Potty commercial and the poop Pore commercial and the purple bed
commercial. And after they had some really big wins, they wrote a book
called From Poop to gold and I remember I read that and it just it
inspired an idea that I had already been thinking about, which was to do
a creative retreat and get away from the office to write a new commercial.
And we did that and we wrote a spot and we came out of that.
Our creative director's idea was don't be a Scooper. The theme and the
purpose was to make people never look at the litter box the same again.
And it was a moment for us as a brand where we really turned heads.
And we launched that in November of twenty nineteen, so right before Covid
started and we accelerated our business overnight. We launched a spot that really got
people to look at the litter box a different way. And I was just
interviewing somebody who just started this week in the company, and I remember in
their follow up interview they said to me, I will never be able to
look at the litter box the same. Ever since we talked and I watched
that commercial, all I can think of every time my scoop now is the
little robot and that was the intent of the commercial. And so that was
another breakout moment for the brand where we really saw the opportunity to turn heads
and to get people thinking differently about the litter box, which is a goal
of ours, is how do we make people look at solutions or chores in
our case and never look at them the same again, Because if we can
do that, it's similar to how you might think about the thermostat nowadays,
or a stationary bike with respect to the peloton or many other products. And
I always rather an to cleanox and tissue paper. Now is that we have
done that in our category? Is we've gotten people look at something and now
think of the little robot instead of the category name itself. So he said,
you know, don't be a scooper and to think about the litter box
totally differently. That you're revolutionizing the way people will look at that. But
we haven't really addressed like what is the little robot and how is it different?
So let's let's I think we need to fill people in on what is
the difference. Yeah, well, since this is a podcast, I'll leave
everybody with the thought of if you are mobile right now and you are unable
to quickly remember this, go tocatpoop dot com because you can't onhearcatpoop dot com.
But the Little Robot is a self cleaning litter box for cats. It
was the first of its kind that used gravity to sift and separate the clean
litter from the dirty litter, depositing the dirty clumps into the waste store beneath
containing those traditional cat litter box odors, while leaving your cat with a clean
bot litter each time. Right, We as human beings, unfortunately are not
perfect people, and we don't tend to scoop on a regular basis when we
have a cat at home, No way. And so when you think about
the idea of a dirty porta potty for human beings, we as human beings
tend not to appreciate those as much as maybe our cat doesn't appreciate their dirty
litter box. So I draw that analogy, which is we as human beings
don't want to go into a used restroom and have to use that restroom,
Well, why should our cats have to do that? With the little Robot
you never have to think about that again. And as a clean metal letter,
each time your cat goes, it's got an ample amount of space for
your cat to get in, do its business and be able to leave.
With a multi cat household It makes it so that you don't have to think
about the litter box every day. And I have one cat at home and
I only have to empty the Little Robot with my old Little Robot three about
every two weeks, with the new Little Robot four every three weeks. It
contains those traditional litter box holders. Even with it being in my wife's office
at the house and heard just being pregnant for the last nine months. It
has been absolutely a game changer on our household, having used it for eight
years, and while I maybe a little bit bias given my role, I'm
also a super user of the product well. And there's a lot of automation
that comes with that because it can't take you either, can't be that amount
of time between changes without a lot of automation. Talk a little bit about
that. Yeah, so the Little Robot is pretty cool. It's as if
your cat is flushing its own toilet. So when the cat enters the unit,
a sensor goes off. With the Little Robot four, that's a series
of different sensors. With the Little Robot three that was a weight sensor.
And what happens is seven minutes after the cat leaves a unit, it automatically
cycles, so it's fully automatic. And now with the digital product that we
have, we have over a half a million users now of our digital product
that are connected to their little Robot units at home or their feeder robot that
get real time notifications and real time insights on what's happening with their path.
Back in twenty nineteen, I was traveling and I was out of town for
about three days. I remember looking at my phone having I was on a
work trip, and I put my phone in the other room so I could
really focus, and I remember walking back to my phone and having a flurry
of notifications from my Little Robot app. And my wife had a miscall.
So I called her back and she said, I just got a bunch of
notifications from the app. What's going on. I just went over to check
on the little robot and Lexie was sitting outside the little robot getting in and
out and out, in and out. We rushed sort of the vat we
found a UTI in our cat before I became a major problem. Wow,
this is something we would have never known with the regular litter box. One
it might have been in our basement. Two it might have been somewhere that
ever that you would have never had any kind of alert that your cat was
going in and out and in and out and actually was probably in some pain.
Correct. And so we've had a lot of these stories come through.
We don't publish them right now because our goal right now as a brand is
to under promise over deliver. We sell you a great automatic litter box,
but some of the new features that we have coming out in twenty twenty three
that will backwards compatible for all of our litter Robot four users and many features
for our litter Robot three as well. Really excited about what's to come with
our digital product, things like the ability to recognize your cat by weight ID
and some other cool features that help to really normalize data for your path and
understand the frequency of use, understand their weight change behaviors. Because the literal
about four weighs your cat each time, I don't think I would have ever
known my cat weighs seven point eight pounds consistently for the last year now.
And that's actually important because cats gaining any fraction of weight or losing a fraction
of weight can be subst chanel and an indicator that something's wrong as well.
Yeah, between that and water, I would say water health the ability or
the ability to track how much your pet is drinking, something that we may
or may not be working on at Whisker right now. I think our really
cool opportunities just understand what is happening with your pet, because unfortunately cats can't
yet talk, right, and this is I would say, the closest way
of understanding what is going on with your pet. Right Why an't we going
to have stuff from you for dogs and ferrets and our fish and come on,
Jacob, get on it. We're working on. We're getting on a
series of things that we believe addressed the core what we call our product trinity,
food, water and waste. And I think right there we can address
a lot of really cool opportunities in the house to both automate chores and also
bring more insight to the pet parent about what's going on with their pat right,
which everybody deeply wants if they care about their pet, and obviously the
majority of people do. We saw some of that in the Super Bowl ads
this weekend, and I think that that was a very empathetic way of relating
to pet parents in general. Notably, we were talking yesterday internally about the
Farmer's Dog commercial. I think they did a really awesome job telling this story
of how we care so deeply about our pats, and I think they did
a really good job with that. Yeah, I agree. So there are
there have been challenges over the growth that you're experiencing. Expressed some of those
to us. Yeah. So we went into twenty nineteen twenty twenty pre COVID
with about ninety nine employees and we come out employing over five hundred people.
So it has been a very busy few years. Fortunately, our growth was
starting in twenty nineteen before COVID happened, so it wasn't necessarily COVID induced.
I think it was actually supported with the extra money in the market and things
of that sort. But we fortunately had a growth year in twenty twenty two
and twenty twenty three is aligning with what we believe is possible with the Whisker
brand. Along the way, we have gone through two factory expansions. So
we started in twenty nineteen with thirty thousand feet, we come out into twenty
twenty three now with two hundred and twenty two thousand square feet. We did
an expansion in twenty nineteen twenty twenty of doubling our foot principle from thirty to
sixty thousand. Before we completed the expansion in twenty twenty, we had already
started the phase two. Well, Phase two and phase three. We readid
our office space both in Michigan and Wisconsin, and we also expanded again,
tripling the size of our facility. That is a lot with supply chain and
manufacturing scalop right to do that and then problems the time, and then add
a global pandemic, I add shortages in supply chain for both building and for
our product. And then in twenty twenty two, I would say we faced
our biggest challenge in our company history, which was launching a new robot at
the volume that we are currently at, which might seem straightforward for certain brands,
but I think when you look at automotive and you think about automotive being
a really great operator for how you scalp a supply chain quickly. They plan
their volumes years in advance. And if you look at the ramp up of
great automotive companies, and I'll use Tessa as an example, you know they're
ramping up the supply chain their ability to produce at a volume that excites the
consumer demand and meet the consumer demand over a period of years. And Rivian's
another great example of that. You know, they're talking about going from tens
of thousands of units to hundreds of thousands over the course of a year.
We did that in one year. It was challenging. We faced about every
hurdle you could ask for. We had to redesign our computer multiple times from
even the time of our beta until the launch because of shortages of different components.
We had to rewrite firmware, We had to scalop the actual supply chain
and headcount in our assembly line to get ready. We had to manage dual
supply chains with the Little Robot three model, the feeder robot and the scalop
of Little Robot four. We had to kind of hedge our bet against the
volumes we would expect with the Little Robot four against the Little Robot three.
And it didn't all go to plan. You know, life does not always
happen as planned. It did not go to plan. We faced some challenges
and I think we learned a lot through that. I think we'd come away
with a lot of learnings as to how to communicate even better with our customers,
how to communicate even better internally, how to react and pivot with respect
to both the marketing and operations and communication side with the supply chainside was something
that when we launched a literal about three seven years ago, eight years ago
now, we didn't have this kind of volume, so it was a very
quiet launch. We were able to do it behind the scenes. We didn't
have a spotlight on us, and we have a much bigger spot today than
we did eight years ago. And I would say it was very visibly seen
that we didn't execute at a level that I would say we're all very proud
of. But I think we'd come out of it a lot prouder in our
ability to work together as a team and to execute better now with some different
people aboard the organization that I think will help steer us in the right direction
and keep us all aligned for a much better next time around. You know,
you said all the things that just don't go to plan as much as
you try to get everything aligned and you know, make the correct projections for
each line and everything and all the stuff that you learned, like that's the
most fun part of business, you know, is like you look back and
you're like, oh my gosh, I learned. It's so much going through
that, and that's what makes it fun, you know. It's I talk
about zero to one and one to two in our business, zero to one
being the things that are inventive and have never been done before. And in
our case, sure have companies launched products before, no question, but we've
also invented a net new product that people haven't brought the market before, right,
and that comes with its own set of challenges, And you know,
I internally, one of the things that I really talk about is the intellectual
challenge that you get when you're doing zero to one work. And at the
outset of COVID in April of two thousand, we had a lot to learn
very quickly. Having manufacturing our own product, we had to figure out how
to do all of that. It was the most intellectually challenging work. I
don't think I've ever had more fun. I think twenty twenty could have been
for me one of the one of the most exciting times. Of course scary
and a lot of unknowns, but intellectually challenging. And I think in twenty
twenty two there were definitely some challenges we've faced before that we faced again in
similar ways, and that was that was for me maybe some of the frustrating
moments where I was like, we've been here before, why are we doing
this again? And so that was a reality check on a certain way that
we were operating and something that I'm really excited to really learn from our challenges
this time around and make sure that we don't make the same mistake twice.
You know, we talk about that as you know, it's healthy to make
mistakes, it's healthy to learn. But when you don't ask the right questions,
when you don't tap into the stakeholders that have seen it before, and
you go into it blindly, without approaching things in a way where somebody has
this knowledge and you should ask questions and be vulnerable and be willing to be
just ask questions that may even to you seem dumb, but to someone else,
I've been there, they know what they're doing. And when you don't
do that, that's what I think. Making the second mistake is not a
positive and not a move forward. And that's where your gray hairs come from,
right, And it's super frustrating. You'd brought up the zero to one
and I have to tell you because I know you have small children's much younger
than mine minor like about ten year period older than yours, and I can't
tell you. You know, you use business to teach them all the time.
You can't help it. It's just part of what you do. And
I talk to them all the time. They'll be like, I don't want
to do this, and I'll be like, the difference between zero and one.
Once you've done it one time, just get the first time over with,
and then every other times easier than that. So just get that zero
to one over with. Let's go, you know. So it's funny.
I just love the zero to one all the time because if you can just
do that first one, you got it. But to your point, hold
on. But to your point is like when you get to six, don't
do the things at zero again. For me, zero to one in my
both personal and professional life is like my favorite. It's the unknown, it's
the lash the paper, it's the ability to think about something that may not
have been done before or that you're doing for the first time yourself. And
for me, that's the most exciting, both as an entrepreneur and somebody who
enjoys challenges. I think that for me is the most exciting, again,
both in personal life and in professional even going from one kid to two.
You see the difference of what you didn't know the first time around and what
you now know the second time. A great example and I saw it with
my wife of just how much more relaxed she was the second time around,
of understanding exactly what was going to be thrown at her. Of course it's
going to be different when the second child, they're going to reactively, but
seeing how she handled that in our personal life and then seeing how I do
that and our team does that in our professional lives, it's really exciting.
And then yeah, when you get the six, if you're doing the same
thing that you tried to do at zero to one that didn't work, yeah,
I think there's a time and place to try things a second time,
but knowingly what didn't work the first time, right, because it might work
the second time as long as you learn from the first time, right,
and using those resources you mentioned of people who actually have the experience from the
zero to one and bringing that back and going hey, let's talk through this
so and I you know, I call it my bench. I've get my
bench a mentors that I go to people that maybe in different roles that are
above where I am in my career, or maybe you haven't yet reached that
point of their career, and I try and tap into any and all resources
that I can to learn from what they've gone through. Because each company is
different, smaller or bigger than Whisker, it doesn't matter because we all experience
things differently. And one of the things for me that I have really appreciated
it's just asking questions and being vulnerable. And I think that in and of
itself is a superpower, is vulnerability and showing where you don't know the answer
and asking the question. And I think what's really cool for me, especially
when you're talking to people who have been through it or have been through versions
of it, they like to share their experience, and you know, I
like to continue building my bench the people that I can go to to ask
questions and how they're doing it. And during COVID, I remember and April
of two thousand, I went to the president of our plastic supplier, who
is a smaller business than Whisker is, but that was looking at things differently
than we were, and I got to pick his brain. Every week we
met for a period of time just to talk about what they were doing versus
what we were doing and to exchange ideas. And it was super cool for
me, as a first time operator of a business of this size, to
pick the brain of somebody who had been doing plastics for as long as they
have and to learn from them. And you know, some people would say,
well, maybe they weren't the size and scale that we were at the
time. That didn't matter because the challenges are the same, It's just at
a different scale. And that for me was really exciting and something that I
still try and do every day. So you'd said, you you're up to
over five hundred people, right, So what is it like to be a
colleague at Whisker? I think right now and what has been is it's a
really exciting time to be part of an organization that I won't steal the Jeff
Bezos mindset of day one, but operating with a day one mindset, and
by that I mean being willing to challenge the status quo, being able to
work on inventive products and companies that have never brought to market before, being
open to new ways of marketing our brand and bringing to market a brand that
has never done something like this before, where we're truly growing a category.
And when you think about growing category and being for lack of a better words,
the cleanex of tissue paper, we've done that in self cleaning utter boxes.
Our brand, the litter Robot as a brand has grown at a rate
that's almost three times faster than the category itself, and we've helped to grow
the categories. The categories enormous and imagine what you've done through the category.
And it's cool because our search volume, which I'm an SEO geek in my
core, our search volume is so much greater for litter Robot than it is
for self cleaning and automatic letter boxes because of our marketing. And so everybody
at at every part of the organization gets to influence that in one way or
another. Whether you're on the front lines building our product or talking to our
customers and our customer experience department, whether you're in marketing helping to shape the
brand that we're building for tomorrow, whether you're in engineering inventing tomorrow's products and
bringing to market new digital and physical solutions, or you're in another department operations
finance or otherwise. You get to work on things that haven't been done before
and scale a company at the rate that we have, and that's just exciting.
And I often say in our business, if we're not having fun in
pet care, in technology, in e commerce and directing consumer, we're doing
everything wrong right and it's all new, how fun and exciting. There's so
much energy there, and you can feel it when you talk about it.
It's really exciting, and I think you can feel it at a lot of
throughout our entire organization, even when I'm in the assembly plan and I'm talking
with our team. But you know, one of the things that we did
in the leadership group, we went and worked on the line with everybody for
two days to kick off our holiday season. It and people ask why I'm
doing that, And maybe I would say a little brash in the way that
the question was asked, But Jacob, what the heck are you doing on
the line with us? And I smiled and I laughed, and I said
two things. One, I want to kick off our busiest time in the
year. Alongside everybody. I was taking customer phone calls. I was working
on the line. If I don't know what's actually happening, I can't do
my job effectively. And secondly, I look at things differently than they do.
When you do something repeatedly often, you don't necessarily see it from a
zero to one mindset. You don't necessarily see the thing that you're doing every
day the same way. And I do, and our team does in a
fresh perspective. Part of our core values is looking at things with fresh eyes
and being inventive in your approach at every level of the org. I do
that every day, and when I'm doing working in somebody else's role, I
get to see it in a different way. And one great example where I
was inventive one of our core values. I was watching we have a calibration
step in our literal ro about four assembly line. It allows us to calibrate
a scale to make sure that it's always perfect, and it's towards the end
of the assembly line. And I was watching this operator do it, and
he was he was doing what he did every day. And I watched him
move the mouse to move to the next step, and he kept moving over
the next step button and I asked him, said, Andrew, or do
you need the button to be bigger? Because no, no, I'm all
good. He was defending it like like I was asking him if he did
something wrong. And I watched him for another twenty thirty minutes and I kept
watching him do it over and over. So I walked away. I called
her it director. I had him make the button bigger in the moment.
I came back a couple of hours later, and Andrews like, all right,
I did thinking about it all day. I liked the button to be
bigger, and it was this small, subtle thing, but for him as
an operator, for him to be able to move more efficiently, feel more
empowered by the work that he was doing, feel more confident in his ability
to do it, and work with in our case, and I hate my
title in this way, but work with the CEO of the company to be
able to make a change up positively impact everybody on that step. That's what
we want to see every day, and that's what I hope that everybody at
Whisker brings every day, is this inventive, fresh eyes, empowered approach to
how they bring change in our company. So what do you with all the
things that are being developed? What is your favorite product at Whisker? So
I'm a user. I have been sure that I haven't said my dog in
three years and I haven't scooped the litter box in eight years. So between
not feeding my dog and not scooping, I have a lot more time to
think about the exciting products that we're working on. UM I think for me,
combination of our our digital product roadmap is super exciting. So with the
literal about four platform drawing the analogy to you know, any other IoT product
platform, we get to continually invent for consumers about the product last year and
the year before that and the year before that four years to come, so
they will continually get new upgrades on their platform. Given I know the product
roadmap, I would say i'd bias. I think they're really cool. I
think some of the things we're able to do in pat health, your ability
to know that your eight eight year old Siberian cat, that's what I have.
She's eight years old, who weighs eight pounds in comparing her anomalies in
weight, fluctuation in litter box use and eventually food consumption and water consumption,
and compare that to all other eight year old Siberian cats on our platform with
a similar weight profile. No other company in the world can do that.
And we have been able to take in just a short amount of time,
over twenty five million cat weight readings in less than a year since we onto
Literal four platform. And that's compounding and exponential. How many did you say,
twenty five million? Wow? Talk about some data, you know,
first party data that you're going to be able to use to help the health
of animals, and it is super exciting. Some of the things that we
have in our product roadmap for the digital the ability to really understand more about
your pat and when we layer in food and water what we call our product
trinity, the digital platform gets that much stronger. And I think for us
that's really cool because when you think about the ecosystem of Apple and why you
get bought into an Apple line of products is one makes the other better,
right, And that's what we want to do here at Whisker, And I
think the digital product for us is one that is really exciting for me.
I think also some of the exciting robots that we have in development and the
accessories we got we got a fun road ahead. Well, it has been
an absolute joy speaking with you today, Jacob. We've been joined today with
Jacob Zupki, the president and CEO and board member from Whisker. Thanks for
joining us today. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.